TEXT: John 20:19-31
Speaker: Mark Rupp

This morning, we are in the second Sunday of the Easter season, but before we transition fully into this season, I wanted to take some time to look back, make some connections, and perhaps add some clarity. 

If you were around during Lent, you might have noticed that even though our overall theme was “Composting Faith,” we used Children’s Time to talk about breadmaking. At first glance, those might seem like two very different things. One is about scraps and soil and decomposition, and the other is about flour and yeast and something we eat. As the person who helped design those Children’s Time lessons, I think I failed to always make the connections between the two very clear. But to me, they are both variations on the same story. 

Both composting and breadmaking are, at their core, cycles of transformation.

In composting, you take what is left over, what seems used up or even lifeless, and through time and the right conditions, it becomes something that can nourish new growth. It doesn’t happen instantly, and it doesn’t come out of nowhere. It is a process that depends on what came before, breaking down and becoming part of something new.

Breadmaking works in a surprisingly similar way. You start with simple ingredients, but what makes bread bread is the transformation that happens over time. The yeast works through the dough. It rises. It changes. And as we explored during Children’s Time, it is not a linear, one-and-done process. It involves waiting, folding, kneading, resting, and sometimes even starting again.

Both of these practices remind us that transformation is rarely about starting from scratch. It is about what happens when what already exists is taken up, worked through, and reshaped over time. I’ve named them as “cycles of transformation,” but in reality there is a kind of spiraling movement to it. Things return, but not in exactly the same way. They come back changed, deepened, made into something that can sustain life in new ways.

That has been part of what we have been exploring throughout Lent. Composting faith is not about throwing things away and beginning again as if nothing came before. It is about trusting that even what feels worn down, broken, or finished can become part of new life.

And as we move into this Easter season, that question doesn’t go away. In some ways, it becomes even more pressing. Because if resurrection is real, if new life is actually possible, then we have to ask: what does that transformation look like? Does it leave everything behind, or does it somehow carry those earlier stages with it?

That is where our scripture today offers something both surprising and deeply grounding. Because when the risen Christ appears to his disciples, he does not show up as something entirely disconnected from what came before.He shows up still bearing the marks of crucifixion.

This Easter season that stretches from Easter all the way to Pentecost is an invitation to linger with the resurrection rather than rushing past it. An invitation to let ourselves ask the hard questions. To see our own doubts, confusions, and fears reflected in the stories of the first disciples trying to figure out what to do on the other side of Easter. 

I was reading one commentary this week where the author pointed out that showing up on the Sunday after Easter can feel like you’ve shown up at a party just as it’s winding down. He writes, “The Easter lilies have been taken away, the fanfares are but an echo of what bounced joyously around the room the week before. There are fewer people and less hoopla. Perhaps the pastor is taking the Sunday off.” (Martin B. Copenhaver, Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 2, pg. 394). 

[I’m going to chalk up the “fewer people and less hoopla” this week to the reality that Columbus City Schools had their spring break and NOT to the fact that the lead pastor is taking this Sunday off and letting me be in charge…]

The stories we find in scripture of the hours and days after the resurrection are full of confusing, sometimes contradictory accounts as the disciples try to make sense of Easter morning. 

The Gospel of John gives us a series of post-resurrection encounters that feel, in many ways, unfinished. The disciples are not suddenly transformed into fearless, clear-eyed witnesses. Instead, they move through confusion, fear, hesitation, and glimpses of recognition. In that sense, these stories feel less like a conclusion and more like an opening into the slow work of becoming a resurrection-shaped community.

Our passage today begins with the disciples gathered together in a house with the doors locked. John tells us plainly that they are afraid. Given what has just happened to Jesus, that fear is not only understandable, it is probably inevitable. Their teacher has been executed, and whatever sense of direction or purpose they once had now feels uncertain at best. So they gather, they close the doors, and they try to work out together where they go from here. 

It is into that space that Jesus appears and speaks a word of peace. And then, almost immediately, he shows them his hands and his side. This detail is easy to pass over, but it is theologically significant. The risen Christ is not presented as a departure from the body that was crucified. The wounds remain visible. Resurrection, in this telling, does not erase what has happened. It does not replace the broken body with something entirely new and unrelated. Instead, it carries those marks forward, somehow transformed, yet still present.

That detail feels especially important given the themes we have been sitting with throughout Lent. We have been talking about composting faith, about the ways in which what appears to be decay or ending can become the very material from which new life emerges. Here, in the resurrection, we see a similar pattern. God does not discard what has been wounded. God brings it into new life. The continuity matters. The past is not denied; it is taken up and transformed.

But Thomas is not there for this first encounter. We are not told why, and perhaps that is intentional. Maybe he needed space. Maybe he could not bear to be in that room surrounded by so much fear. Maybe he was the only one honest enough to step outside the fear instead of sitting in it.

His absence leaves space for us to consider the many ways people move through grief and uncertainty differently. When the other disciples tell him, “We have seen the Lord,” his response is the one that has followed him through time and earned him his nickname. He tells them that unless he sees the marks of the nails and touches the wound in Jesus’ side, he will not believe.

It is worth slowing down enough to hear what Thomas is actually asking for. He is not requesting a general proof or a convincing argument. He is asking to encounter the wounds. He wants to know that the one who stands before him as risen is the same one who was crucified. In other words, he is insisting that resurrection must be connected to the reality of suffering and death, not detached from it.

Too often, Thomas is reduced to a symbol of doubt, as if his role in the story is simply to model what not to do. But his response can also be understood as a refusal to accept a version of faith that bypasses embodied reality. He is not interested in a resurrection that hovers above the world. He does not seek some otherworldly escape from reality. He is asking for evidence that the savior who they claim has stood among them is the same one that walked with them, taught them, and still bears the marks of what has been endured. 

There is something deeply grounded, even faithful, in that insistence.

A week later, the disciples are gathered again, and the doors are still shut. That detail suggests that their initial encounter with Jesus has not resolved everything. One encounter with Jesus rarely resolves anything. And the disciples are still in process, still negotiating fear and uncertainty. 

This time Thomas is with them. Jesus appears again, speaks peace again, and then turns directly to Thomas, offering him exactly what he has asked for. There is no rebuke, no shaming, no contrast drawn between Thomas and the others. Instead, there is an invitation: see, touch, encounter.

What follows is not a description of Thomas actually touching the wounds. It’s not clear if he does. But rather the text jumps straight to Thomas’s confession, “My Lord and my God.” Whatever he needed, he receives it in that moment of encounter. It is not simply evidence that changes him, but relationship. He is met, and in being met, he responds.

This story, then, presses us to consider how we understand both resurrection and faith. If the risen Christ still bears wounds, then the new life God brings is not disconnected from what has come before. It grows through it. That has implications for how we understand our own lives. 

The places that feel marked by loss, by grief, by fracture are not outside the reach of resurrection. They may, in fact, be the very places where new life is already beginning to take shape, even if we cannot yet see it clearly. They may just be the clearest evidence that we are all part of cycles of transformation if we trust the Spirit to help us shift ever so slightly more toward love, peace, and wholeness. 

This story also asks us to take seriously the embodied nature of the good news. We do not experience life in the abstract. We experience it through our bodies, through relationships, through the material conditions of our world. If the good news of resurrection is to mean anything, it must speak into those realities. Thomas’s insistence reminds us that faith cannot remain at the level of ideas alone. It must connect with the lived, physical, and often messy realities of human life.

Because we carry wounds too. Some are visible. Many are not. We carry grief. Loss. Betrayal. Fear. Questions that do not have easy answers.

We live in a world that is also deeply wounded. We see injustice. Violence. Systems that harm and exclude. Communities that are fractured.

And sometimes the temptation is to look for a kind of faith that rises above all of that. A faith that offers certainty instead of complexity. A faith that promises everything will be fine if we just believe hard enough.

In a world where those at the highest levels of power threaten to wipe out entire civilizations on a whim, it can be easy to throw up our hands and fall back on a faith that says that our only hope lies somewhere else.

But the resurrection we see in John does not do that. It does not bypass the wounds. It does not pretend they are not there. It does not offer a neat resolution.Instead, it shows us a Christ who is alive and still bearing the marks of suffering. A Christ who insists that the good news must matter for our lived realities and not just help us escape them.  

As we continue through this Easter season, it may be worth paying attention to where these dynamics are at work in our own lives. Where do we find ourselves drawn toward a version of faith that avoids the harder realities of life? Where are we carrying wounds that we would rather set aside, even though the story of resurrection suggests that those very places might be taken up into something new? And how are we practicing being a community that can hold together honesty, vulnerability, and doubt?

The promise of this passage is not that fear disappears or that every question finds a clear answer. The disciples are still behind locked doors. Thomas still asks for what he needs. But in the midst of all of that, Christ continues to show up. He speaks peace into fearful spaces. He bears wounds that still speak. And he invites his followers into a way of life that does not move around suffering, but through it, trusting that even there, new life and new cycles of transformation are possible.

Even though we are on the other side of Easter, we can learn to trust that every encounter with the risen Christ is its own mini-Easter that helps us begin again on these cycles of transformation. Whether it is the grace of a stranger we meet along the road, the reassurance of a friend in a time of fear, or the simple pleasure of breakfast on the beach with our companions, may every encounter be one where Christ is revealed and we are transformed again and again and again…